Michael Löwy: “Jewish Messianism and Libertarian Utopia in Central Europe (1900-1933) New German Critique, 20, Spring/Summer 1980, pp. 105-115. “The thesis that socialism is only a secularized form of Jewish messianism has frequently been put forward by its contradictors and critics. Lucien Goldmann is one of the rare Marxists who was ready to assume this possible heritage in positive terms: ‘It is representations like the coming of the Messiah, the Kingdom of Heaven, etc., which are found devoid of any transcendent or supernatural element in this immanent religion called socialism, in which they take the form of hope and faith in an immanent historical future that men must realize by their own action. “This hypothesis, however, remains too abstract and too vague. The suggestion presented by Karl Mannheim in Ideology and Utopia seems more precise and concrete: radical anarchism is the modem figure of the chiliastic principle, the relatively most pure form of modem utopian/millenarian consciousness. According to Mannheim, the 20th-century thinker, who most closely personifies this spiritual attitude of a ‘demonic depth,’ is the Jewish anarchist writer Gustav Landauer, one of the spiritus rectores of the Bavarian Republic in 1919. It is interesting to recall in this connection that, according to the German sociologist Paul Honigsheim (former member of the Max Weber Circle of Heidelberg and friend of Georg Lukács and Ernst Bloch), some of the participants in the Republics of the Workers Councils of Bavaria and Hungary were convinced of being called to carry out the mission of the redemption of the world and belonging to a collective messiah. Actually, besides Gustav Landauer, other Jewish intellectuals (Kurt Eisner, Ernst Toller, Erich Miihsam) played an important role in the Bavarian Republic, while Lukács and other members of the Budapest Jewish intelligentsia were among the leaders of the 1919 Hungarian Republic. “In order to attempt to examine this issue thoroughly, it would be necessary to examine the possible political implications of Jewish messianism itself. By taking the analyses of Gershom Scholem (universally recognized as the greatest authority in this area) as the point of departure, the question can be narrowly defined. In his essay, ‘Towards an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,’ Scholem states: ‘There is an anarchic element in the very nature of messianic utopianism: the dissolution of ancient ties which lose their significance in the new context of messianic freedom.’ This statement is very illuminating, but it seems that the analogy between the messianic utopia and the libertarian utopia goes beyond this factor and is manifested in several other decisive aspects of these two cultural configurations. To examine this analogy, I shall use a theoretical model- the ideal type - of Jewish messianism formulated by Gershom Scholem and a few remarks by Karl Mannheim on radical anarchism. 1. “Jewish messianism includes two tendencies which are intimately linked and contradictory at the same time: a restorative tendency, oriented toward the reestablishment of a former ideal state of a lost golden age, a shattered Edenic harmony, and a utopian tendency, aspiring to a radically new future that has never existed. The proportion between the two tendencies can vary, but the messianic idea is only crystalized by their combination; they are inseparable in a dialectical relationship remarkably demonstrated by Scholem: ‘Even the restorative factors are at work .... The completely new order contains elements of the completely old one, but even this old order does not lie in the real past. It is rather a question of a past transformed and transfigured into an enlightened dream by the rays of utopia. ‘The Hebraic concept - biblical and cabalist - of tikkun (simultaneous restoration, reparation and reform) is the condensed expression of this duality of the messianic tradition. “However, it is precisely in libertarian thought that a similar combination of conservatism and revolution is found, as Mannheim stresses elsewhere. With Bakunin, Proudhon or Landauer, revolutionary utopia is always accompanied by a profound nostalgia for past pre-capitalist forms of the traditional peasant or artisan community.... “It is true that a romantic-nostalgic dimension of this type is present in all anti-capitalist revolutionary thought, Marxism included, contrary to what is usually thought. Nevertheless, while with Marx and his followers this dimension is relativized by their admiration for industry and economic progress brought by capital, (who in no way share this industrialism) it is manifested by a particular intensity and even unique force with the anarchists. Of all the modern revolutionary currents, anarchism is undoubtedly the utopia which contains the strongest romantic and restorative weight. The work of Landauer is in this regard the supreme expression of the romantic spirit of libertarian utopia. ... 2. “According to Scholem, Jewish messianism (as opposed to Christian messianism) considers redemption as a necessary event that takes place on the stage of history, ‘publicly’ so to speak, in the visible world.... What type of ‘visible’ event is at issue? For the Jewish religious tradition, the coming of the Messiah is a catastrophic irruption: ‘Jewish messianism is by its origin and its nature - this cannot be stressed enough - a theory of catastrophe. This theory stresses the revolutionary and cataclysmic element in the transition from the historical present to the messianic future.’ “Between the present and future, the present-day decline and redemption there is an abyss; moreover, in many talmudic texts the idea appears that the Messiah will only come in an era of corruption and total culpability.... This abyss cannot be crossed by some sort of ‘progress’ or ‘development.’ Only the revolutionary catastrophe, with a colossal uprooting, a total destruction of the existing order, opens the way to messianic redemption.... “The parallel between this significant structure and modem revolutionary doctrines is suggested by Scholem himself: ‘Messianism of our era proves its immense force precisely in this form of the revolutionary apocalypse, and no longer in the form of a rational utopia (if one may call it that) of eternal progress as the Enlightenments surrogate for Redemption.’ In his view, the heirs of this Jewish tradition are those whom he calls ‘the most important ideologists of revolutionary messianism in our century’: Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. “It seems to me, however, that without denying the more general scope of the analogy, it is in libertarian thought (including that of Walter Benjamin) that the parallel is most striking. It is indeed with the anarchists that the revolutionary/catastrophic aspect of emancipation is most evident: ‘The destructive passion is a creative passion’ wrote Bakunin.... 3. “...With the messianic era, the former Torah loses its vitality and will be replaced by a new Law, the ‘Torah of the Redemption,’ in which interdictions and prohibitions will disappear. In this new paradisaic world, where the force of evil has been broken, and which would be dominated by the light of the Tree of Life, the restrictions imposed by the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil would lose their significance. This ‘anarchic’ element is also manifested, as Scholem very Clearly shows, in certain interpretations of Psalm 146:7 that offer a new reading of the Hebraic text. In the place of the traditional version according to which, in the messianic era ‘the Lord frees the prisoners’ (matir assurim), it should read ‘The Lord lifts the interdictions (matir issurim). Scholem correctly qualifies this problem of ‘anarchic’: one need only think of Bakunins famous formula - cited by Mannheim as characteristic of the chiliastic posture of radical anarchism - ‘I do not believe in constitutions or laws .... We need something else; passion, life, a new world without laws and thus free.’ “The analysis of the three aforementioned aspects must be conceived as a whole; thus it reveals a remarkable structural homology, an undeniable spiritual isomorphism between these two cultural universes situated in these apparently completely distinct spheres: the Jewish messianic tradition and the notably libertarian modem revolutionary utopias. During the years 1900-1933, among a certain number of Jewish intellectuals of German culture, this homology became dynamic and took the form of a veritable elective affinity, in the Goethian sense of Wahlverwandschaft: two elements or beings which ‘are looking for one another, are attracted and seize each other ... and then resurge from this intimate union into a regenerated, new and unexpected form.’... ... b) “The Jewish messianic tradition used to lend itself to multiple interpretations: purely conservative readings as in certain rabbinic texts, or purely rationalist texts (Maimonide), or also those inspired by the liberal-progressive spirit of the Aufklörung (Jewish Haskala), as with Hermann Cohen. But why precisely did a certain group of thinkers choose an interpretation which was apocalyptic, restorative and utopian all at the same time? “The inverse explanation would be namely the utopian-restorative tendency of these authors who were aware of their borrowing from the messianic tradition. This explanation is as limited and curtailed as the first. One of the great merits of the Wahlverwandschaft concept is precisely to allow going beyond these two unilateral approaches, toward a richer and more dialectical understanding of the relationship. “It seems more useful to take as a point of departure a wider socio-cultural context, which serves as a general framework, common to the two mentioned tendencies, and which grows organically ,so to speak, out of central European societies in crisis. The new development of romanticism from the end of the 19th century until the beginning of the 1930s does not designate here a literary or artistic style, but a much vaster and more profound phenomenon: the nostalgic current of pre-capitalist cultures and the current of cultural criticism of industrial/bourgeois society, a current that is manifested in the realm of art and literature as well as in economic, sociological and political thought. “Anti-capitalist romanticism - to use the term created by Lukács - is a particular political and cultural phenomenon, which has not yet received the attention it deserves because it escapes habitual classifications; the traditional division of the political field into the left/center/right triad - or conservatives/ liberals/revolutionaries, or still regression/status quo/progress - does not permit it to be grasped; it slides into the mesh of this classical framework and seems ungraspable in the framework of categories which the great political options have defined since the French Revolution. This difficulty is even more accentuated in comparison with one of the tendencies of the romantic current, which we have elsewhere designated as revolutionary romanticism, and to which thinkers as diverse as Hölderlin, Fourier and Landauer belong. It concerns a tendency in which nostalgia for the pre-capitalist past (real or imaginary, near or far ), and the revolutionary hope in a new future, restoration and utopia, are combined and inextricably associated. ... “...The two [i.e., Jewish messianism and libertarian utopia, Y.O.] are rooted in the same ground, the two develop in the same spiritual climate - that of the anti-capitalist romanticism of the German intelligentsia.... “In order to understand the particularity of the reception of anti-capitalist romanticism among Jewish intellectuals, their specific and contradictory situation in the social and cultural life of Central Europe must be sociologically examined: they were both deeply assimilated and largely marginalized; they were attached to German cosmopolitan culture, yet freischwebend and uprooted; they broke from their business bourgeois origins, were rejected by the traditional rural aristocracy, and excluded from their natural place of reception (the University). It is not surprising that a significant number (much larger in England or France, countries that had a completed bourgeois revolution behind them) of Jewish intellectuals from Germany and Austria-Hungary were ideologically available for the tide of radical questioning of the established order. “...For the others, that is to say, most, there were only two possible outs (in the neo-romantic framework): either ar etum to their own historical roots, to their own culture, nationality or ancestral religion, or adherence to a romantic-revolutionary utopia of universal character. It is not surprising that a certain number of Jewish thinkers of German culture, close to anti-capitalist romanticism simultaneously chose these two roads under the form of the (re)discovery of the Jewish religion (in particular the restorative-utopian interpretation of messianism) and of sympathy or identification with revolutionary utopias (notably the libertarian ones) heavily charged with nostalgia for the past - all the more as these two paths, as we have seen above, were structurally homologous. This double approach characterizes several Jewish thinkers from Central Europe who constitute an extremely heterogenous group but nevertheless unified by this common problem. One can find among them some of the greatest minds of the 20th century: poets and philosophers, revolutionary leaders and religious guides, Commissioners of the People and theologians, writers and cabalists, and even writer-philosopher-theologian revolutionaries: Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Gustav Landauer, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Ernst Toller, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács. “...Let us state, first, that without constituting a group in the concrete and immediate sense of the term, they are, nevertheless, linked by a complex and subtle social network. Relationships of deep friendship and/or intellectual, and political affinity unite Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Gustav Landauer and Ernst Toller. Scholem was attracted to Buber and to Landauer, Buber corresponded with Kafka, Bloch and Lukács.... “However, that is not the essential point. What permits us to conceive of these nine men as a group - which could be expanded with further research to include other thinkers of the time - is the fact that within a cultural neo-romantic background and in a relationship of elective affinity, their work contains a Jewish messianic dimension and a utopian-libertarian dimension.... ... “On the basis of the predominant role of one or another dimension, it seems possible to divide the group into three sets: I - the anarchistic religious Jews: Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem. The latter two were Zionists, the first, rather hostile or reticent toward Zionism. In spite of their refusal to assimilate and their return to Judaism (as a religion and a national culture), political and spiritual (utopian and libertarian) preoccupations of universal character are present in their work and separate them from a narrow or chauvinistic nationalism (Buber and Scholem, after leaving for Palestine, were among the founders of the pacifist organization Brit Shalom, which advocated fraternizing with the Arab population and opposed the establishment of an exclusively Jewish national state). II - The religious Jewish anarchists: Gustav Landauer, Franz Kafka, and Walter Benjamin. These three are characterized by a contradictory and tom attitude towards Judaism and Zionism, which they periodically approached and drew away from. Their anarchistic utopia is strongly tinted with religiosity and drawn from messianic sources (usually Jewish but sometimes Christian, too). III - The assimilated, atheist-religious, anarcho-Bolshevik Jews: Georg Lukács, Ernst Toller, Ernst Bloch. Contrary to the others, they tended to abandon their Jewish identity, while keeping, nevertheless, an obscure link with Judaism. Their religious atheism ( Lukács term) was nourished by Jewish as well as Christian references, and their political evolution led them from a utopian-libertarian problem toward Marxism and Bolshevism, or resulted in an attempt at a synthesis of the two (that goes for Benjamin also). “The differences between these three groups reveal that the elective affinity between Jewish messianism and anarchist utopia also includes an antinomic element. It is a question of a tension, if not a contradiction, between Jewish particularism (national-cultural) of messianism and the universal character (humanist-internationalist) of emancipatory utopia. In the first group, the predominance of Jewish particularity tends to relativize the universal revolutionary aspect of utopia without making it disappear completely. In the third, on the contrary, the universality of utopia is the preponderant dimension, and messianism tends to be devoid of its Jewish specificity - which is not, in spite of everything, entirely erased. The intermediate group is characterized by a fragile and unstable equilibrium between particularism and universalism, Judaism and internationalism, Zionism and anarchism. “...On the other hand, the three tendencies outlined here are not the only possible ones (within the common problem). In order to concretize these two remarks, the example of Rudolf Kayser, a friend of Benjamin and his ‘protector’ in the Fischer Publishing Company is useful... As contributor to the journal De, Jude edited by Martin Buber in 1919, he published a surprising article which placed him in a separate category, halfway between Buber and Landauer. While refusing Zionism, he favored the establishment of a ‘New Alliance’ (Neue Bund), a ‘Jewish Association’ (jüdische Genossenschaft) - which he compared to the Taborites and Hussites of the 15th century - whose mission would be to ‘prepare for the era of the Messiah’ by helping humanity to pass from ‘the hell of politics’ to the ‘messianic paradise. ‘This mission implied the abolition of the State, a task for which the Jews are called upon to fill an essential role, in so far as ‘one can imagine no community farther from the State than this, religious ethic of the Jews .... The idea of the State is a non-Jewish (unjüdisch) idea.’ The Hebraic religious community was distinguished from the State by the absence of relationships of domination: power belongs to the divine idea alone. In conclusion: ‘Here then is the mission of the Jews: remaining themselves without a State, to make of the earth a homeland of men.’ “In what milieu, group or current could one find other thinkers with a vision of the world similar to that of the nine mentioned authors? It is not likely that one can find them among intellectuals of Jewish origin from the KPD (German Communist Party ), who were bound up in another problem, foreign to Jewish messianism (and to religion - Jewish or any other - in general) as well as to anarchist ideas. Some were from the same milieu that we are studying - it suffices to think of Gershom Scholems brother Werner, who became a communist deputy and was excluded from the Party in 1926 as leftist dissident (with Ruth Fischer and her current ) - butthe most important were the natives of the Eastern European Jewish communities: Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches, Eugen Levine (the Spartakist leader ofthe Bavarian Revolution, shot after the defeat of the Bavarian Riiterepublik), Karl Radek, etc. The difference of perspective between the radical Jewish intelligentsia of Central Europe and that of the Russian Empire is sociologically explicable; some rebelled against an assimilated and vaguely liberal bourgeois milieu; others rebelled against the traditionalist and cramped ghetto. Parallel to the romanticism of some intellectuals seeking their Jewish roots we find the internationalist, atheist and Aufklärer Marxism of others. That is true, to a large extent, for the Jewish anarchists of Russian origin like Emma Goldmann or Berkmann. ... “In his work on Landauer ,Eugene Lunn advances an interesting sociologicall hypothesis in order to explain the attraction of so many Jewish intellectuals to anarchism: ‘If, as I have said, marginal intellectuals have the strongest tendency toward anarchism in highly industrialized societies, then it was far more likely for a Jewish intellectual to become an anarchist in Germany than a non-Jewish one. One reason was the fact that a disproportionate number of German Jews were free-lance writers, artists and private scholars, which may have been partly owing to the discrimination against them in the established judicial, administrative and educational fields. ‘ These intellectuals found themselves then in a marginal and ‘free-floating’ position, which constituted the most favorable sociological context for revolutionary, notably libertarian currents. “...” ------------- Translated by Renee B. Larrier. tinyurl/kb6yjyg
Posted on: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 14:52:54 +0000
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